The bound volumes of the Clark County Press sit on a shelf in the basement of the Neillsville Public Library, and they’re falling apart. The spines on the 1893 and 1894 editions have split open. Pages from October 1897 — the week the county fair ran its livestock judging results and the school board met to discuss a new coal furnace — have gone brittle enough that turning them leaves flakes on the table. Donna Schultz, who has volunteered at the historical society desk on Thursday afternoons for the past eleven years, handles them the way she handles her late mother’s quilt: carefully, knowing the material is past saving.
“I had somebody come in last month looking for their great-grandfather’s obituary,” Schultz said. “He died in 1912. I knew exactly which reel it would be on. I put the microfilm in the reader, and the image was just gray. The whole reel had gone bad.”
The microfilm reader — a Canon MS400II that the library acquired used from a state agency office in 2009 — still powers on. The film inside the canister labeled “Clark County Press, Jan 1910–June 1912” had not. Acetate decomposition, sometimes called “vinegar syndrome,” had turned the strip into a curled, cloudy ribbon that produced nothing readable on the screen. Schultz sent the researcher home with a phone number for the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, where a duplicate reel might exist. She wasn’t sure. Nobody had checked in years.
This isn’t a story about one broken microfilm reel in one basement. It’s about what happens to the first draft of local history when the institutions that created it, stored it, and indexed it are all failing at the same time — and nobody with a budget is paying attention.
Three Problems Stacked on Top of Each Other
The first problem is physical. Newsprint from the late 19th and early 20th centuries was printed on acidic paper that degrades steadily over decades. Libraries and historical societies across central and western Wisconsin hold bound volumes of weekly newspapers that are literally crumbling on shelves. Microfilm, long considered the preservation standard, has its own shelf life. Acetate-based film, common in reels produced before the 1980s, breaks down in ways that are irreversible without specialized, expensive conservation. Polyester-based film lasts longer, but many county historical societies don’t know which type they have. They just know the image is getting harder to read.
The second problem is institutional. The newspapers that produced the raw material — the obituaries, the town board minutes, the school lunch menus, the 4-H fair results, the wedding announcements, the coverage of barn fires and creamery openings — are disappearing. According to research tracked by the Pew Research Center, the United States has lost roughly a third of its newspapers since 2005, and the communities most affected are rural, lower-income, and geographically isolated — in other words, most of Wisconsin outside the Madison-Milwaukee corridor. The Clark County Press itself isn’t dead, but it has gone from a staff of four full-time reporters in the 1990s to one part-time editor who also runs the local radio station’s morning show. The paper still publishes, but the depth of coverage — the granular record of civic life that someone a century from now might want to read — has thinned to almost nothing.
The third problem is the one nobody wants to name out loud: even if the paper survives, and even if the archives are physically intact, there may be nobody left to read them, index them, or know what they contain. The institutional memory of who covered what, which years are missing, which reels have duplicates in Madison, and which bound volumes are too fragile to handle — that knowledge lives in the heads of volunteers like Donna Schultz. She is 74. There is no succession plan.
What Gets Lost When the Archive Goes Dark
Marlys Henning ran the obituary desk at the Clark County Press from 1987 to 2019. She didn’t think of it as a desk. She thought of it as a beat. When somebody died in Curtiss, or Willard, or Granton, the family called Marlys. She wrote the obituary from notes the funeral home provided, but she also added details: the deceased’s years on the town board, the ribbon-winning Holstein at the 1978 fair, the Sunday school class she taught at Trinity Lutheran. She kept a three-ring binder of every obituary she wrote, organized by year, in a filing cabinet in the Press office on Hewett Street.
“People don’t understand what an obituary is,” Henning told me when I visited her at her home just outside Neillsville. She is 81 now and uses a walker to get around her kitchen, but her voice is steady. “It’s not a death notice. It’s a record that somebody lived in a specific place, at a specific time, and did specific things. If you lose that, you lose the person.”
When the Press cut her position in 2019 — not by firing her, but by eliminating the hours — the binder went with her. It sits in a box in her spare bedroom. The Press now runs obituaries as paid submissions, formatted by the funeral home, with no local editor adding context. The difference is visible: a 1998 obituary written by Henning for a Granton farmer named Raymond Opelt runs 14 inches and mentions his 31 years on the Granton School Board, his role in organizing the Clark County Dairy Days committee, and the names of his four grandchildren. A 2024 paid obituary for a farmer from the same township runs four inches and lists the funeral service time.
Henning’s binder isn’t digitized. It isn’t indexed. It isn’t in any catalog. When she passes, her family will have to decide what to do with it, and there’s no obvious answer. The historical society has no staff to process it. The library has no budget to scan it. The Wisconsin Historical Society accepts donations but has a processing backlog measured in years.
This is what archivists call a “silent loss.” It doesn’t make headlines. Nobody holds a press conference. The material simply becomes inaccessible, one binder at a time, one reel at a time, one volunteer at a time.
The Volunteer Infrastructure That’s Holding the Line
In Vernon County, about three hours south of Neillsville, a retired high school English teacher named Patrice Korn is running what she calls “the world’s worst-funded digitization project.” Korn taught at Viroqua High School for 28 years. When she retired in 2020, she started volunteering at the Vernon County Historical Society, where she found 340 reels of microfilm containing newspapers from Viroqua, Westby, Coon Valley, and La Farge dating back to 1872. About 60 of those reels, she estimated, had visible degradation.
Korn taught herself to use a flatbed scanner — an Epson Expression 12000XL she bought with a $2,400 grant from the Vernon County Farm Bureau — and began scanning bound newspaper volumes page by page. She scans at 600 dpi, saves the files as TIFFs on two external hard drives (one stored at the historical society, one at her house), and creates a PDF copy for the library’s public computer. She has processed roughly 1,200 pages in two years. At that rate, she told me, she’ll finish the 1890s by the time she turns 80.
“I’m not an archivist,” Korn said. “I’m an English teacher who knows how to use a scanner. Everything I’ve learned about file formats and metadata, I learned from YouTube videos and a very patient woman at the Wisconsin Historical Society who answers my emails.”
The Wisconsin Historical Society does maintain a newspaper digitization program, and it has been effective for select titles. But the program prioritizes newspapers with statewide historical significance — the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal — and has limited capacity for small-town weeklies. A single reel of microfilm can cost $200 to $400 to digitize professionally. A county historical society with 340 reels is looking at $68,000 to $136,000, which is more than most of them spend in a decade.
The volunteers know this. They’re not waiting for a grant that may never come. They’re doing what they can with what they have, and what they have is a scanner, a spare bedroom, and time.
The Make-Do Publishing Operation
Digitization is one half of the preservation problem. The other half is making the material accessible once it’s saved. A TIFF file on a hard drive in Patrice Korn’s house isn’t accessible to a genealogist in Portland or a high school student working on a National History Day project. It needs to be organized, contextualized, and published in a form people can actually use.
This is where a parallel volunteer effort has emerged: small-scale, self-published local history booklets. Historical societies across rural Wisconsin have been producing these for decades — spiral-bound, photocopied, 40-page compilations of old photographs, transcribed oral histories, and reprinted newspaper clippings. They sell them at the county fair booth for $12 apiece, and they use the proceeds to buy archival sleeves and acid-free boxes.
The publishing process is bare-bones. A volunteer transcribes oral history interviews or scans old photographs, lays out the pages in Microsoft Word or — in one case I saw in Trempealeau County — in a pirated copy of Adobe InDesign from 2012, and sends the file to a print shop in Eau Claire or La Crosse. The print shop runs 200 copies on a digital press. The historical society picks them up in somebody’s Subaru and stacks them in the museum basement.
One of the recurring bottlenecks in this process is titling. Volunteers spend hours debating what to call a commemorative booklet — whether to use the town name and the year, whether to include a subtitle, whether “memories” belongs in the title or sounds too sentimental. It sounds trivial until you watch six people at a historical society meeting spend 40 minutes on this question because nobody wants to make a unilateral decision and nobody has a framework for making one. When a volunteer is already stretched thin scanning brittle newsprint and formatting oral history transcripts, spending an evening brainstorming title ideas for a booklet about the Loyal Fire Department’s centennial is not a good use of anyone’s time. A simple naming tool — a practical book title generator that produces working titles for local history compilations — can move that conversation from 40 minutes to five and get the booklet to the printer before the county fair deadline.
The Authors Guild has written thoughtfully about the ethical boundaries writers should observe when incorporating AI tools into their work, emphasizing that human voices and original thinking must remain central to any writing that claims authorship. That principle applies cleanly here: a title generator is a utility, not a co-author. The oral histories, the transcribed obituaries, the scanned photographs — that material is the work, and it is entirely human. The tool just helps the volunteer get past the blank-page problem so the booklet can exist at all.
What the State Could Do — and Hasn’t
Wisconsin isn’t without preservation infrastructure. The Wisconsin Historical Society, headquartered on University Avenue in Madison, is one of the largest state historical agencies in the country. Its newspaper collection includes more than 150,000 reels of microfilm. The Wisconsin Newspaper Association, a trade group based in Madison, has advocated for state funding to support local journalism and preservation, though with limited success in the current legislative environment.
The gap between what exists at the state level and what reaches a basement in Neillsville is the problem. There is no state program that provides direct grants to county historical societies for newspaper digitization. The Wisconsin Historical Society offers guidance and technical assistance, but its budget for direct local support is thin. The most recent state budget, signed in July 2025, included $500,000 for a competitive local journalism grant program — the first of its kind in Wisconsin — but the program’s rules, drafted by the Department of Administration, require matching funds that most rural historical societies cannot produce. A society with an annual budget of $8,000 cannot match a $25,000 grant.
Meanwhile, the physical decay continues. Donna Schultz showed me a bound volume of the Clark County Press from 1903 that had water damage along the bottom edge — the result, she believed, of a pipe that burst in the library basement in 2016. The pages affected included the March through May editions, which meant the coverage of that spring’s town meetings, the school board election results, and the announcement of a new creamery in Lynn Township were all partially illegible. She had placed archival tissue between the damaged pages to slow further deterioration, but she knew the information on those pages was already gone.
“I called Madison about that one,” she said. “They told me they might have a duplicate reel. I sent them an email. That was two years ago. I never heard back.”
The Cost of Not Knowing What You’ve Lost
There is a tendency, when talking about archives, to frame the loss in abstract terms — “a gap in the historical record,” “an irreplaceable community resource.” Those phrases are accurate but insufficient. They don’t capture what it actually means when a specific person walks into a specific library on a specific Thursday afternoon and cannot find the obituary of a specific man who died in 1912.
The man who came looking for his great-grandfather last month was named Rick Stieber. He drove up from Waukesha, where he works as a project manager for a commercial HVAC company. His great-grandfather, August Stieber, homesteaded in Clark County in the 1880s, and Rick had found the land patent record through the Bureau of Land Management’s online database. He wanted the obituary because it would tell him whether August had children other than Rick’s grandfather, and whether any of them had stayed in the area. He had a free Saturday and a four-hour drive. He figured he’d find it in an hour.
He didn’t find it. The reel was bad. Donna Schultz was apologetic and helpful and gave him the number in Madison. Rick drove home and told his wife he’d try the state archive later. He hasn’t called yet. He’s busy. The trail, such as it is, has gone cold — not because the information doesn’t exist, but because the medium that holds it has degraded beyond use, and the person who would have known where the backup was located is a volunteer who can’t get a return email from a state agency.
Multiply Rick Stieber by every family genealogist, every local history researcher, every National History Day student, every property owner researching a land dispute, every journalist trying to write a retrospective, and every funeral director pulling details for a service program. The volume of unmet requests is unknown because nobody tracks it. The historical societies don’t have the staff to track it. The libraries don’t have the mandate. The state doesn’t ask.
What we do know is that the problem is getting worse, not better, and that the volunteers holding the line are aging out of the work without replacements. Patrice Korn told me she has tried to recruit younger volunteers — people in their 40s and 50s who might carry the project forward — and has had no takers. “People are working,” she said. “They’re working two jobs, or they’re taking care of parents, or they just don’t want to spend their Saturday in a basement looking at a scanner. I understand it. But that doesn’t change what’s going to happen to this material.”
A Question Without an Answer Yet
Donna Schultz plans to keep coming in on Thursdays for as long as she can drive. She has started writing down what she knows — which reels are bad, which bound volumes are fragile, which years have duplicates in Madison — in a spiral notebook she keeps in the historical society desk drawer. She calls it “the cheat sheet.” It isn’t a finding aid in any professional sense. It is one woman’s notes, in pencil, in a notebook that could easily be misplaced.
When I asked her what happens to the cheat sheet when she stops coming, she looked at me for a long moment and then said, “I guess I should make a copy.”
She’s right. She should. Somebody should. But the question that sits underneath that one — who writes the obituaries now, who keeps the archive, who reads the reel before it goes dark, who decides what gets saved and what gets left to the vinegar syndrome and the brittle paper and the burst pipes — doesn’t have an answer yet. And every Thursday that passes without one, the window narrows a little further.